While looking into the history of film and the biggest influence that go along with it, I noticed the constant allusion to the film Citizen Kane. I have noted that the film was important before, but I never really knew how important it was to the development of film away from just a sort of hobby that imitated plays to an actual art form. And the more I researched it, I found a glaring irony surrounding the film that I think would work extremely well for this paper.
The thing is I'm not going to just talk about Citizen Kane. I'm going to talk about where film was before Citizen Kane, and what the movie did for films after it by raising questions of what the problem surrounding the film was. I made a in-progress template:
The film was incredible and revolutionary, but it has a glaring problem.
-Was it the storytelling?
-No, Brand new way of storytelling, an unreliable narrator, worked in flashbacks and other people’s testimonies
-Was it the cinematography?
-No, it was revolutionary:
Not just apples and oranges, even though it came out fifty years later. Movies were still filmed as if they were on a stage, with a camera pointed in one direction, focused on one thing, and on one action. Look even at a scene from The Wolfman, a movie released the same year (1941) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q4Wn63uof8 as opposed to the dynamics of just a conversation scene of Citizen Kane http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAHaRDlUrLw
speak of train pulling into station, Moliere, and it not moving forward from that. Wells attributes to nothing but dumb luck.
-Was it the film itself?
-It was nominated for six Academy Awards, considered the greatest film of all time by AFI, the story is still referenced and used by filmmakers today (think The Social Network)
Of course, I'm not going to list the inconsistency here, but I am very excited about it.
While looking into the history of film and the biggest influence that go along with it, I noticed the constant allusion to the film Citizen Kane. I have noted that the film was important before, but I never really knew how important it was to the development of film away from just a sort of hobby that imitated plays to an actual art form. And the more I researched it, I found a glaring irony surrounding the film that I think would work extremely well for this paper.
The thing is I'm not going to just talk about Citizen Kane. I'm going to talk about where film was before Citizen Kane, and what the movie did for films after it by raising questions of what the problem surrounding the film was. I made a in-progress template:
The film was incredible and revolutionary, but it has a glaring problem.
-Was it the storytelling?
-No, Brand new way of storytelling, an unreliable narrator, worked in flashbacks and other people’s testimonies
-Was it the cinematography?
-No, it was revolutionary:
First film in existence was two seconds long in 1888:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1i40rnpOsA
First film to really start the bandwagon of film came from 1895 and the Lumiere brothers with Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjtXXypztyw
Not just apples and oranges, even though it came out fifty years later. Movies were still filmed as if they were on a stage, with a camera pointed in one direction, focused on one thing, and on one action. Look even at a scene from The Wolfman, a movie released the same year (1941)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q4Wn63uof8 as opposed to the dynamics of just a conversation scene of Citizen Kane
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAHaRDlUrLw
speak of train pulling into station, Moliere, and it not moving forward from that. Wells attributes to nothing but dumb luck.
-Was it the film itself?
-It was nominated for six Academy Awards, considered the greatest film of all time by AFI, the story is still referenced and used by filmmakers today (think The Social Network)
Of course, I'm not going to list the inconsistency here, but I am very excited about it.